Investigation of mental toughness and emotional intelligence levels of taekwondo athletes

The aim of this study is connected to Turkey Taekwondo Federation of licensed athletes over the age of 18 are still actively ongoing to determine the relationship between levels of mental toughness and emotional intelligence and also gender, age, education, sport, age, national and state variables in terms of the number of weekly training in sportsmanship to examine. The research group consists of a total of 206 volunteer taekwondo athletes, including 113 women (54.9%) and 93 men (45.1%) who are over the age of 18 affiliated to the Turkish Taekwondo Federation and are currently actively participating in competitions. The participants were determined by the easily accessible case sampling method from non-probability based sampling methods. In the research, "relational screening method in descriptive screening model" was used. As a data collection tool; "Personal Information Form", "Mental Endurance Inventory in Sports" (SZDE), "Emotional Intelligence Inventory in Sports" (SDZE) were used. In the analysis of the data; Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test and Shapiro-Wilk Test were applied to the research findings before the analysis and interpretation of the research data, and it was understood that the data did not show a normal distribution because p<0.05 was less. According to this result, Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis H Tests were used for unrelated measurements in the analysis of the data. In addition, Spearman Correlation test was used to examine the relationship between the variables. In the interpretation of correlations, 0.00-0.30 is low; 0.30-0.70 medium; 0.70 and above were evaluated as high (Büyüköztürk et al. 2013). The analyses were performed in the SPSS 21 package program and the significance level of the data was taken as p<0.05. As a result of this study; It can be said that there is a moderately positive relationship between emotional intelligence and mental toughness, and that an increase in emotional intelligence skill level can also increase the level of mental toughnes.